I am in Australia and am shortly going to be travelling to the UK and Europe. While there, I was hoping to go on a bit of a type tour - looking at places and things of typographic significance.
What suggestions of places and things to see do people have? This may be an interesting list to make into a sticky post too.
Things I'm thinking of are:
type foundries
presses
museums
typographers birth places/places of work
examples of fonts
etc.
Thanks!
Just a brief start…
St Bride Printing Library, London
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
maybe the University of Reading, UK
Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, Germany
Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Germany (depending on the exhibition, at least)
Lots of bookstores in Berlin
Plantin–Moretus Museum, Antwerp
Rome (all of it)
but I particularly enjoy the lettering at Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Vatican, St Paul's Outside the Walls, and the Forum
Florence (all of that, too)
But Santa Croce may have the most lettering
If you contact St. Bride ahead of time they can usually arrange to have some of the juicier bits available for you. http://www.stbride.org/
If you end up in Provence, stop by Arles for the Museum and the Necropolis. Both feature Roman sarcophagi and tombstones inscribed with text and all sorts of crazy custom ligatures, IIRC most of the Roman goodies date from ~0 to ~1000 AD.
And I second the notion of digging deep into Florence. It's an amazing place.
The British Library has the Lindisfarne Gospels.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/euromanuscripts/lindisfarne.html
If you’re in Dublin drop into The Chester Beatty Library for their East Asian, Islamic and Western scripts and prints. Inspiring stuff.
Bruce,
I took a typographic tour of London recently with John Voller. I highly recommend it.
My images can be seen here: [Edit]
Not all the descriptions have been added yet.
See also Typetours: http://www.typevents.com/index.php?id=79,0,0,1,0,0
Captured from commoncrawl.org on 21 Apr 2015. original URL